History And Place Myth And History example essay topic

Recovering Identity Through Myth, History and Place Myth and history are necessary in explaining the world, and can be depended upon for guidance with one as reliable as the other. The idea of place, with its inherent myth and history, is an important factor in one's identity because place shapes character and events. Robertson Davies' Fifth Business, E. Anne Proulx's The Shipping News, Michael Ondaatje's In the Skin of a Lion, and Jack Hodgins' The Invention of the World use myth and lore to describe the obstacles which the protagonists and others must get over or confront in order to recover their perspective identities. Place anchors the novels in Canada: Fifth Business in Ontario, The Shipping News in Newfoundland, In the Skin of a Lion in Toronto, and The Invention of the World on Vancouver Island. Because they are different places, different stories develop; but since these places are in Canada, they share the Idea of North in which the dream world is as important as the real world. This paper will demonstrate this typically Canadian characteristic of myth coexisting with reality, showing that explanations of identity given by myth and the oral tradition are at least as powerful as documented history.

In order to understand how myth and history work to explain things and recover identity it is important to understand their similarities and differences. Myth and history are similar in that they both explain, instruct, give origin, and shape the world. Their differences lie in the use of the supernatural. Whereas myth deals with 'supernatural beings, ancestors, or heroes,' and explains 'aspects of the natural world,' history is 'A chronological record of events, as of the development of a people... A formal written account of related natural phenomena' (College Dictionary 903,644). Myth relies on faith for belief, while recorded history relies on documentation or proof.

Though they differ in these ways, myth and history are both equally reliable sources of explanation and guidance. Whereas one event may be documented to have taken place and another event may not have such proof, both happenings offer the same end: what is to be learned from the story. Northrop Frye writes in 'The Koine of Myth' that there are stories that 'may be asserted to have really happened, but what is important about them is not that, but that they are stories which it is particularly urgent for the community to know. They tell us about the recognized gods, the legendary history, the origins of law, class structure, kinship formations, and natural features' (Myth and Metaphor 5). If a person learns from myth to live in this world as a whole person, she has a truth at least as functional as one taken from recorded history or documented fact. Billy Pretty in The Shipping News does not use recorded scientific methods to chart his way in the water, as one who studies history might.

Rather he relies on oral tradition to keep his boat from hitting known sinkers. Enveloped in thick fog, Billy uses a rhyme from the time when people sailed without modern aides such as charts or lights: When the Knitting Pins you is abreast, Desperate Cove bears due west Behind the Pins you must steer 'Til The Old Man's Shoe does appear. The tickle lies just past the toe, It's narrow, you must slowly go. (175) The idea of finding one's path by way of myth or oral tradition is typically Canadian, since not all of Canada has been mapped from the ground. In many cases myth is more reliable than recorded history because its telling goes back farther in time, and thus it existed before documentation.

It had power before the printing press inked history books. Further, the example of the 'Gammy Bird' (a paper that prints fake advertisements and recycles wrecks to present them as new) as a spreader of information and truth proves that documented 'facts' are not always to be believed. Dunstan Ramsay in Fifth Business argues that 'a serious study of any important body of human knowledge, or theory, or belief... would in the end yield some secret, some valuable permanent insight, into the nature of life and the true end of man' (Davies 169). All myths, then, may have truths in them. Padre Blazon teaches Ramsay that mythical stories and history are equally reliable forms of truth.

Ramsay states that 'religion and Arabian Nights were true in the same way... they were both psychologically rather than literally true, and... psychological truth was really as important in its own way as historical verification' (Davies 71). Ramsay's experience teaches him that myth acts in the same manner as history, and that one is a part of the other. He writes, 'As I have grown older my bias -- the oddly recurrent themes of history, which are also the themes of myth -- has asserted itself' (Davies 117). Ramsay continues in wondering, 'Why do people all over the world, and at all times, want marvels that defy all verifiable facts? And are the marvels brought into being by their desire, or is their desire an assurance rising from some deep knowledge, not to be directly experienced and questioned, that the marvelous is indeed an aspect of the real?' (Davies 199). Because there is truth in myth, and history includes aspects of the marvelous, both myth and history describe events and places with equal reliability.

There is, however, something more fulfilling in myth because it does not consciously keep inside the borders of an assumed reality. Because of this nonconformity, myth can be just as powerful a teacher today as it was in earlier ages. It is etched in our memories more than is history because the lesson taught through myth is more important than the recorded facts. Northrop Frye, in writing of poetry, demonstrates that documented 'fact' is not as useful or important to us as language: 'Each age of science stands on the shoulders of its predecessors; poetry knows nothing of progress, only of recurrence... Poetry attempts to unite the physical environment to man through... metaphor' (The Stubborn Structure 84).

Because the things that are presented as recorded facts, such as the Mongolians crossing the Bearing Strait and spilling into Canada and the US. around the time of the ice age, are often shown to be incomplete and must be built upon, they are not the most reliable source of truth. The unscientific explanations given by the language of poetry or myth are often more useful since they rely on themselves, rather than proof and progress for power. Furthermore, the proof of a thing's existence is not always reliable. Proof of existence includes the seeing, touching, and documenting of a thing or event. This begs the question: Can something be shown to exist without proof?

And once proven, does this thing truly exist as it is presented? In Hodgins' The Invention of the World Wade Powers shows his doppelganger his replica of a fort. This replica is seen by most tourists as a real fort where battles took place. Wade's twin says, 'It's a good spot... You couldn't ask for better proof' (Hodgins 198). The irony is that there is no historic fort on this sight, and the person talking to Wade does not exist as most would expect a person to exist.

He is like a ghost who is occasionally sighted. In order to prove to Virginia that his twin exists, Wade locks him in the false dungeon of the fort and brings Virginia there. The door is open when they arrive, and there is no twin. The door is left unscathed, like nobody had been locked up or had escaped from the dungeon.

The twin's existence, therefore, is in question even though he is seen by the guests at the last wedding. Ondaatje furthers the idea of documented events and 'proven's tories being questionably true as he writes in In the Skin of a Lion, 'Official histories and news stories were always soft as rhetoric, like that of a politician making a speech after a bridge is built, a man who does not even cut the grass on his own lawn' (145). Because proof is not consistently true, myth is needed alongside history to explain the world. Myth is tainted with truth or reality, and vice versa, making myth and proven reality interdependent of one another as hydrogen and oxygen are in water. Not only does myth explain, but in using metaphor it teaches how to behave in the world. For example, Alice acts as a puppet besieged by oppressors who speak a language she does not know.

The puppet uses the metaphor of stamping its foot for attempting to speak a language it does not know, 'to try and bring out a language' (Ondaatje 117). Later Alice tells Patrick, 'You reach people through metaphor. It's what I reached you with earlier tonight in the performance' (Ondaatje 123). The reason Alice uses dramatic action as a metaphor, rather than teaching by giving an historical lecture about a proletariat's need to rise is because metaphor has more power than dry facts. Smoky Bear, a metaphor for friendly wildlife, is a more powerful teacher to children to prevent forest fires than is the factual account of the burning of the Capitan mountains. The myth of Paul Bunyan and Babe the Blue Ox expanding the west for habitation is grasped by more people than is the history of the people who died on their way from the east.

In In the Skin of a Lion Patrick Lewis is an alien in his own country because he does not know the myth of the land. His father 'did not teach him anything, no legend, no base of theory' (Ondaatje 18). Had his father taught him the myths he needed, Patrick might have come to Toronto a whole person. Of course, as the world changes some old myths cannot give useful explanations. Whereas Glenn Gould presents the mystic north as a place of quiet whiteness and isolation, where a person could be alone because comfortable transportation had not yet made its way that far north, many parts of Canada are now heavily populated. Snowmobiles roar through the snow and loud tourists come expecting to see stoic Eskimos bundled up in fur.

In The Invention of the World Wade Powers considers the myth of the mystic north, then rejects it, knowing it no longer exists: Powers 'contemplated the possibilities of silence. Then he ducked out, chose sunlight, and heard the beginnings of life again. Tires whined by on the highway; a jet streaked eastward ahead of its own sound; seagulls screeched. He headed across the yard towards his own car' (206). This demystification of the idea of north is used by many Canadian writers because they believe the myth has been overused.

Ondaatje, in In the Skin of a Lion, writes, 'What he remembered was loving only things to do with colour, hating the whiteness... the acrid shit and urine he could summon up even now in the heart of Toronto' (53). This is not to say Canadian writers do not still hold the idea of north to be true in part, as demonstrated by their use of it, but rather the myth is worn and should be replaced with new myths. We see the idea of north still being used as Robertson Davies makes Paul Dempster powerfully mysterious by presenting him as 'a child of the steppes, who had assumed his wolf-name in tribute to the savage animals whose midnight howls had been his earliest lullaby' (Davies 216). Ondaatje uses the sense of mystic north in In the Skin of a Lion as he writes, 'The vista was Upper America, a New World. Landscape changed nothing but it brought rest, altered character as gradually as water on a stone' (126). Unlike science, which must progress in order to continue explaining, and must connect itself to its predecessors like a growing cancer in order to progress, myth attempts to connect the physical world to people not by progressing in a traceable sequence, but by piecing together the small details of life.

In In the Skin of a Lion Ondaatje describes Patrick becoming whole by creating his own mythic connections: His own life was no longer a single story but part of a mural, which was a falling together of accomplices. Patrick saw a wondrous night web -- all of these fragments of a human order, something ungoverned by... the headlines of the day. A nun on a bridge, a daredevil who was unable to sleep without drink, a boy watching a fire from his bed at night, an actress who ran away with a millionaire -- the detritus and chaos of the age was realigned. (145) Though it is common to dismiss old myths, the impetus for creating myth is still strong in the writing of Ondaatje, Proulx, Davies, and Hodgins. Ondaatje shows Nicholas Temelcoff and Patrick constantly looking beyond what is right in front of them, thereby exemplifying the need for something more than reality; Proulx gives magical power to Quoyle's cousin so that he can create storms with knots; Davies writes of peoples' need to 'be in awe of something' (Davies 261); and Hodgins' drive toward myth is demonstrated by David L. Jeffrey who writes, 'Hodgins shows subculture that cannot do without religious phenomena, whether of the Brother Twelve sort, or, as Keneally's last wife puts it, 'some sort of magic' ('Jack Hodgins' 125).

There is still the need for myth, new or old, because without it we live in a small world with restrictive boundaries that do not become wider as our history progresses. It is clear that myth and history are important because they both give the information a society needs, such as identity. Myth gives us sight into a world without limits, and history gives a clear understanding of possibility -- a traceable chronology that we can use to order the world. Identity can be found in both. Myth has the power to explain the unexplainable, giving us room to move about in and explore our own interpretations, while history tells us who are ancestors were and how they got here, according to consensus. Many of the characters in these novels are on a journey to find out who they are because they feel that something is missing, that what they see right in front of them is not enough.

Without identity one lives as a severed, ineffectual person. Each character, in recovering identity, must use not only myth and history for fulfillment, but place as well. Ramsay must adopt the myth of the Saints and come to grips with his dark side. Quoyle must understand his identity through myth, history and place in Newfoundland. Patrick, who is an alien in his native land, must create his own personal myth as I have earlier described. Ramsay's identity is severed, as demonstrated by his head as he gets a haircut at Myron Papple's barbershop.

Papple tells Ramsay, 'You got a double crown. Did you know that? Makes it hard to give you a cut' (104). It is ironic that Ramsay does not need a cut, but a piecing-together. The myth of the Saints gives Ramsay an escape from his unbearable existence in a closed-up Protestant town with little trust of imagination or deviance from the norm of living in 'reality. ' He can identify with the saints more than with the townspeople.

When he unlocks the cabinets that hold the books of Saints, Ramsay opens a whole new world unto himself and is thereby freed from the communal constraints that will not allow him to be a whole person. Through his efforts he uncovers something almost magical. This unlocking scene runs parallel to Hodgins's cent in which Keneally imagines unlocking a slab of stone and finding mythic truth inside: 'Touching it, running his hands over its rippled worn surface, he could have believed the secrets of centuries were absorbed in the stone, to be unlocked if only he knew how it were done' (Hodgins 119). Similarly the Canadian Indian rock carver patiently chips away at a stone expecting a spirit to help him unlock the character (s) that are in mind for that stone. We can see in these examples that myth is derived not only from people, such as the Saints, but from place as well. In order for Quoyle to gain his identity he will rely on the myth of place.

He must go back to his family's land and confront his ancestral past because he has been living a miserable fragmented existence in the United States: 'His earliest sense of self was a distant figure; there in the foreground was his family; here, at the limit of the far view, was he' (Proulx 2). For Quoyle, the real people are in Canada, and he must go there to find himself. This is evident as the narrator describes Quoyle displaced in the United States: 'Nothing was clear to lonesome Quoyle. His thoughts churned like the amorphous thing that ancient sailors, drifting into arctic half-light, called the Sea Lung; a heaving sludge of ice under fog where air blurred into water, where liquid was solid, where solids dissolved, where the sky froze and light and dark muddled' (Proulx 3). In changing place and confronting its myths and obstacles, Quoyle gains his identity and thus becomes a whole person who can see clearly. As he feels a sense of place in Newfoundland, Quoyle feels 'spasms of joy.

For no reason that he could think of except the long daylight, or the warmth, or because the air was so clear and sweet he felt he was just learning to breathe' (Proulx 320). Quoyle becomes an exceptional person once he finds out who he is in relation with place. Northrop Frye explains this phenomenon of place as identity, writing, 'Identity is local and regional, rooted in the imagination, and in the works of culture' (The Bush Garden ii). In the film A Journey Without Arrival Frye says, 'Identity is not who am I, but where is here. ' This demonstrates the idea of place having the power to form identity in people. This notion is strong in Canada, but is common in many Native American lands as well. N. Scott Moma day speaks of Jemez, New Mexico in 'Mirage,' saying, 'I consider it one of the most powerful landscapes I know...

People and story... exist only in place. People belong to place' (17). In addition to recovering identity through history, myth and place, many characters in Canadian writing must deal with their own shadows. The myth of one's shadow stems from the need for balance. Dark and light are opposites, and both will exist whether or not one fights the other, so they should exist in harmony and form a healthy balance. Liesl explains this to Ramsay, saying he has not matured or come into himself as a person: 'You are like a man of fifty whose bottled-up feelings have burst their bottle and splashed glass and acid everywhere... you have no art of dealing with such a situation as a man of fifty, so you are thrown back to being like a little boy' (Davies 221).

Liesl goes on to tell him that in order to become whole he must confront the side of his life he has not lived (Davies 226); and this side is what Jung calls 'the shadow. ' In Murray Stein's Jung on Evil C.G. Jung writes: The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is the essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance. (95) ' In telling Ramsay he must recognize and confront his shadow Liesl says, 'You should take a look at this side of your life you have not lived... You must get to know your personal devil...

Why don't you, just for once, do something inexplicable, irrational, at the devil's bidding, and just for the hell of it? You would be a different man' (Davies 226). Ramsay takes Liesl's advice, demonstrated by his sleeping with her. Because she represents the devil (this is made evident as Ramsay twists her nose in the way a saint would twist the nose of the devil disguised as a woman, and in his later reference to her as the Devil in conversation with Blazon), and she wants him to sleep with her, Ramsay has done the devil's bidding. Ramsay learns that his fissured self originates in himself; and he must confront the side of himself that is hidden from his conscious in order to live a life that is not tragic. Jung explains what may happen to a person who does not confront his shadow, and in doing so describes Boy Staunton's life: 'It is often tragic to see how blatantly a man bungles his own life and the lives of others yet remains totally incapable of seeing how much the whole tragedy originates in himself, and how he continually feeds it and keeps it going' (Jung on Evil 96).

Boy's unconscious 'spins the illusions that veil his world. And what is being spun is a cocoon, which in the end will envelop him' (Jung 96). This is demonstrated as Boy refuses to accept responsibility for causing Mrs. Dempster's insanity and Paul Dempster's premature birth. The tragedy originates in Boy's throwing a rock-filled snowball at Ramsay and hitting Mrs. Dempster instead. He keeps the tragedy going by denying the truth of the situation, and this denial eventually causes his death. Whether he has committed suicide or been murdered, it is the rock from the snowball that is found in his mouth, signifying his denied part in the tragedy.

Ramsay, in addition to finding wholeness in his confrontation with his own shadow, looks to the arguably mythical saints for identity. Because they are not perfect, he can get over the guilt he has felt for the snowball incident. The saints are also an antidote to his mother's orthodox Calvinism, in which she beat him as a child for taking eggs to practice magic. Thus the power of story, from history or myth, must be used in order to become a whole person.

Identity is discovered through myth, history and place. In Canadian literature myth is at least as important as fact or history, since in the Idea of North the dream world is as important as the real world. Frye illustrates this duality, stating that 'the summit of vision and the depth of annihilation are the same point, the still point of the turning world' (The Stubborn Structure 277). These novels demonstrate that history alone is not enough for wholeness; there are useful truths beyond our rational selves. It is the power of stories that come from myth and place that give us a sense of identity.

Through myth and place we get glimmers of truth and ourselves, and often find they are stronger than what the 'real' world tells us. One may know history but still be incomplete. The Idea of North demonstrates that it is the meeting with that which is beyond the real that will give a person wholeness.

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